Having the Run of the Place

They were all chained up in the field and you could hear the chains rattling from far away as they strained against them. We figured that if we left all the vampires out there the aliens would come and sweep them up and we’d be able to sleep again at night. We were only half right. The flying saucer came and the spinning knives chopped up all the vampires, which was good I suppose, but then the saucers came over here and tore the roof off the church and went straight to the mall, sucking all the shoppers out.

Sure, we had no vampires but half of the village was gone and the ones left were, for lack of a better word, the idiots. I don’t know why they didn’t take me. I figure maybe it’s cause they didn’t see me. Then the federal agents came into town with their artillery but there wasn’t much to see anymore except for a church with no roof and some blood spatters in the mall.

I tried to tell the feds what really happened but as soon as I started in about vampires, well you know how they get. The feds took everyone else back to be decontaminated or something but again, they forgot me, so I stayed in town. I started to enjoy having the run of the place. One night I went to the tavern and acted out the role of the bartender, talking to my imaginary customers. I mixed some drinks for them, which of course I drank myself. I ended up out in the field where we’d chained the vampires and the chains were still there, scattered around. I leaned against the old fence, drinking straight from the bottle now.

It looked like something was moving in the grasses, maybe groundhogs or badgers were getting at the vampire meat. I peered down and saw what looked like a large rat shoot through the grasses, landing on another rat. Then another thing that looked like a rat shot over and attached on to the first two rats. It wasn’t long before I realized they weren’t rats. Even in my drunken state I could see it was the vampires reassembling themselves. Soon a torso came together, then a piece of an arm would attach itself. I stood there swaying, quite mesmerized.

Suddenly one of them stood up and loomed over me, looking like Frankenstein’s monster with chunks of meat stuck disgustingly together to make a body. I turned to run but my foot got caught on one of the chains and I went down, falling directly on my face. All I could think was that it was probably my last few minutes on earth before being turned into a vampire myself. But when I dared turn my head I saw they weren’t paying any attention to me, they just all sprouted giant bat-wings and took off into the sky, probably in pursuit of the aliens in the flying saucers. I lay there for a while feeling oddly disappointed. Then I got up and walked back through the empty town, the loneliness finally kicking in.